The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. - The Global Globules Affair (novel)

The Global Globules Affair, published in 1967, was one of five tie-in novels associated with the short-lived TV series The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. which aired on the American NBC network in 1966-67. All five tie-in books were original novels although only two were published in the United States. The Global Globules Affair was not published in the U.S. but was available in Britain, Australia, New Zealand and some other markets.

The author was Simon Latter, who was actually British writer Reginald Martin (1908-71). Martin wrote in various genres and was also reasonably successful as a children’s author.

The Global Globules Affair gets under way when secret agent April Dancer, on leave in London and wandering through Carnaby Street, notices a curious new fashion trend - metal dresses. She also runs into Dr Carl Karadin. Karadin is a mad scientist but he’s generally been presumed to be a harmless example of the breed. And then April’s fellow U.N.C.L.E. agent Mark Slate has to borrow money from her. He had two five-pound notes in his wallet but they’ve kind of disintegrated. Which causes April to remember that Dr Karadin had been something of a crank on the subject of global currency reform.

There doesn’t seem to be much connection between these odd events but April has a hunch there may be a sinister pattern here and U.N.C.L.E. chief Alexander Waverley has learnt to respect April’s hunches. April and Mark will investigate further, and they will uncover a bizarre conspiracy involving molecular globules of a chemical known as K.S.R.6, disappearing bank notes, metallic clothing, sinister street signs and dolly birds on mopeds.

It’s a story that is in keeping with the feel of the TV series. It’s outlandish but clever and witty. The TV series at times became too overtly silly and too self-consciously high camp. Both Simon Latter and Michael Avallone, who wrote the other Girl from U.N.C.L.E. tie-in novel I reviewed recently, have (wisely) tried to keep the silliness and the camp elements within strict limits. They’ve also added just a very slightly darker edge. On the whole I think The Global Globules Affair feels like it could have been one of the better and less silly Girl from U.N.C.L.E. episodes.

Latter has done a reasonably effective job bringing April Dancer and Mark Slate to the printed page. Mark Slate is the trickier character since his personality in the TV series is largely the product of Noel Harrison’s delightfully quirky performance. On the whole though the two U.N.C.L.E. agents are fairly believable as the characters from the TV show.

In the TV series the relationship between the two characters is made quite clear. They’re friends and colleagues but they have no romantic interest in each other. That relationship is maintained in the novel.

Most crucially Latter has come up with a fairly entertaining story. There’s plenty of action, there’s reasonably amusing banter between the two lead characters, there are cool gadgets, there are fast cars and helicopters and the conspiracy is something that threatens the entire civilised world.

Latter’s prose style is perfectly adequate and he avoids the temptation to try to be too jokey.

Like most TV tie-in novels this is a fairly short novel. Like the TV series it’s based on it’s a light-hearted and enjoyable mix of science fiction and spy thriller. Recommended.

Adventure and Comic Strip: Exploring Tara King’s The Avengers (book review)

There have been quite a few non-fiction books on The Avengers, but not too many dealing specifically with the Tara King era. So that in itself is a strong recommendation for Rodney Marshall’s 2013 tome Adventure and Comic Strip: Exploring Tara King’s The Avengers. An even better recommendation is that Marshall takes a very favourable view of this period of the show’s history.

Having said all this I’m not entirely sure I can recommend this book. The big problem is that it’s kind of thin. There’s really not much to it. Basically it’s just an episode guide, and not a very detailed one. On the plus side he doesn’t give us just a synopsis of each episode. There is a bit of analysis. It’s not too in-depth but it’s a bit more than just fanboy gushing. On the whole he avoids pretentious academic jargon and he generally doesn’t try to ram his political views down the reader’s throat (which is a very unusual thing for a book published in our modern age).

The episode guides are reasonably stimulating and he shows a real understanding of the appeal of the series.

The biggest plus is that Marshall doesn’t start out with the prejudice that of course the Tara King era was inferior to the Emma Peel era and that of course Linda Thorson was a poor replacement for Diana Rigg. Marshall approaches the series with an open mind and finds a great deal to like about the Tara King episodes. Since I happen to be a very big Tara fan this naturally inclines me to approve of the book.

You just can’t get away from the fact that there’s not a great deal of text here. And there are no illustrations.

Marshall is incidentally the son of Roger Marshall, one of the great British television writers of the 60s and 70s.

Adventure and Comic Strip is a welcome reassessment of a much maligned period of the history of one of the great television series so I’m inclined to recommend it in spite of its thinness.

The Avengers #6 The Drowned Queen (novel)

Like most successful television series of its era The Avengers gave rise to a number of tie-in novels. These seem to have all been original novels rather than novelisations of episodes. The cover of The Drowned Queen indicates that it was the sixth Avengers novel but in fact there had been eight previous novels, not all of them from the same publisher. And some of the Avengers novels seem to have been published only in the US while others were only available in the UK so it does get a mite confusing. The Drowned Queen was the first of the Avengers novels to feature Tara King.

The Drowned Queen is certainly very ambitious. Steed and Tara King have gone undercover as crew members on the Atlantic Queen which is making its maiden voyage across the Atlantic.  The Atlantic Queen is not however a conventional ocean liner. It is a submarine ocean liner! It carries two thousand passengers and will make the entire voyage submerged. Trouble has been threatened, hence the presence of Steed and Tara on board.

It soon becomes evident that there is indeed a plot to sabotage the vessel. In fact there may be multiple conspiracies. When Steed engages the chief engineer in conversation he discovers that there may also be real questions about the submarine liner’s safety, even in the absence of sabotage.

There’s dirty work at the crossroads and the bad guys are prepared to go as far as murder. In fact they’re prepared to go much further than that.

There’s a reasonable amount of action and there is some genuine excitement. There’s also the kind of high-tech stuff and gadgetry that you normally get in a Bond movie but that was beyond the budget of a TV series in the late 60s. There is actually a bit of a Bond movie flavour to this tale.

Steed will have to learn to pilot a midget submarine and to deal with Hindu magicians, boa constrictors, pet sharks, predatory widows, card tricks, dangerous blondes and mermen. Steed is very much the hero here with Tara unfortunately playing a somewhat secondary rôle.

I’ve read a number of TV tie-in novels from the 60s recently and I’m starting to realise that writing an original novel based on a TV series was actually a lot trickier than you might think. It’s not that easy for a writer to take characters developed by another writer and keep the characterisations consistent and it’s even more difficult when the characters were originally created in a different medium. A related challenge is to capture the tone of the TV series.

The Drowned Queen doesn’t quite succeed in these two respects although it’s a brave attempt. The author, Keith Laumer, was an American and that might have been the problem. Although it achieved some popularity in the United States The Avengers was one of the most quintessentially English TV shows of the 60s (in fact that was probably a large part of its appeal to American audiences). To get the authentic feel of Steed and Tara as characters probably was something that required an English writer.

On the other hand Laumer does get the right mix of action, adventure and humour. And he is fairly careful not to descend to slapstick, which would have been quite wrong for an Avengers story, and he does try to avoid taking an overtly American approach to the humour.

One of the interesting challenges of a tie-in novel like this is that there is the opportunity to go beyond what could be done on television at the time. That’s both an opportunity and a danger if you take it too far or start moving in a direction that conflicts with the essential character of the TV series. In this case we have an author who was a reasonably successful science fiction writer so it’s no real surprise that he gives us a story that pushes things more overtly in a science fictional direction compared to the series (although the series most certainly dabbled in science fiction). He also takes the opportunity of giving us a story on a larger scale than would have been possible on 1960s television. The Drowned Queen would have required special effects that would have been out of the question on TV. So it is intriguing to see a story that explores possibilities that the TV series could not have explored.

The question is, does Laumer go too far? Has he created a novel that is just too science fictional to be an Avengers story? I don’t really think so. While he was certainly writing a science fiction novel he was aware that it was supposed to be an Avengers novel so he’s careful not to get bogged down on technical stuff and he (quite rightly) isn’t the slightest bit interested in making the story scientifically plausible.

The Avengers could be outrageous but it always managed to avoid descending into mere silliness. Laumer mostly tries to avoid mere silliness as well, and mostly he succeeds. He doesn’t quite manage the wit of the TV series but the book is fairly amusing. It’s also fast-paced and it’s definitely fun. If you’re a fan of the series it’s recommended.

Space 1999: Alien Seed (novel)

Space: 1999 spawned a very extensive series of spin-off novels which, remarkably, have continued to appear well into the 21st century. Most of the 1970s novels were novelisations, usually combining three or four episodes of the TV series into a single narrative. There were however several original novels published in the 70s, including E.C. Tubb’s Alien Seed which came out in 1976.

Given that the two seasons of Space: 1999 were rather different in format and tone (with Year Two being almost universally regarded as very much inferior to the first season) it’s important to note that this is a Year One story.

The author assumes, doubtless correctly, that if you’re reading a Space: 1999 novel then it’s virtually a certainty that you’re familiar with the TV series and that you know the basic setup - a gigantic nuclear explosion has knocked the Moon out of Earth’s orbit and turned it into a huge spaceship hurtling uncontrolled through the galaxy. The crew of Moonbase Alpha, several hundred people, survived the blast and now they’re hoping to find a planet they can colonise.

It starts as a fairly typical Space: 1999 story. An unidentified object is heading towards the Moon. It’s on a collision course and the impact could destroy Moonbase Alpha. Commander John Koenig has to take prompt action to save Moonbase Alpha, and his scientific adviser Victor Bergman tries to persuade him to find a way to save the base without destroying the object. The object is rather curious. There are no signs of life and it seems to be basically just a very large rock but it looks odd enough to raise doubts as to whether it is a natural formation, and then there are the membranous wings.

Perhaps it would have been better to have destroyed the object. As the title of the book suggests the object is a seed pod but it contains more than seeds. What it contains is very frightening indeed.

This is a story of an encounter with something very alien indeed but there’s more to it than that. There’s also the telepathy angle. At the time that the object was first sighted Dr Helena Russell just happened to be carrying out an experiment on extra-sensory perception on a very promising young female subject. This turns out to have very significant ramifications.

The ESP angle might raise eyebrows but back in 1976 the idea of ESP as a reality did not seem as crazy as it doers today and fairly respectable scientists were still inclined to keep an open mind on the subject. ESP apparently is a subject in which the author of this novel has a certain interest and he manages to introduce it into his story without too much silliness.

In fact there’s really not a great deal of silliness at all in this novel. I’m not sure that I’d go so far as to describe it as hard science fiction but it’s certainly closer to hard SF than you expect from a TV tie-in novel. There’s at least some effort to keep things vaguely convincing. Of course it’s worth remarking that the reputation of the Space: 1999 TV series for silliness is largely due to the lamentable second season while the first season was reasonably serious, quite ambitious and often surprisingly intelligent.

The characters generally behave in ways that are consistent with the characterisations in the TV series. This is crucially important in a TV tie-in novel - if you fail to achieve this consistency then you end up with just a generic science fiction novel.

The setting is used skilfully, with constant reminders that the crew of Moonbase Alpha have no-one but themselves to rely upon and have to deal constantly with the psychological dangers of loneliness and despair. John Koenig is a man who can never forget even for a moment that he bears a heavy burden of responsibility - one mistake could mean the end of the line for Moonbase Alpha and everyone in it.

The relationship between Koenig and Victor Bergman is handled well also. Bergman is brilliant but he is sometimes blinded by his scientific ardour. Koenig clearly is the man who has what it takes to be a leader, even when that means taking difficult or unpopular decisions. He feels the burden of leadership but he accepts it. That burden is something that the other characters don’t always understand and than sometimes leads to tensions.

Tubb is not a dazzling literary stylist but he’s a competent writer and he knows how to structure a story and how to keep the pacing nicely taut.

Alien Seed is one of the more successful TV tie-in novels that I’ve read. It has a slightly more serious tone than the TV series but it still feels like a Space: 1999 story. If you’re a fan of the series you’ll enjoy this book. Even if you’re not a particular fan of Space: 1999 this is still a decent science fiction novel. Highly recommended.

The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. - The Birds of a Feather Affair (novel)

The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. only lasted for one season (from late 1966 to early 1967) but it did spawn a series of tie-in novels. There were five original novels, although oddly enough three of them were published in the UK only.

The Birds of a Feather Affair by Michael Avallone was published in both Britain and the United States in 1966. What’s immediately obvious is that the tone is rather more serious compared to the TV series. The TV series is wildly uneven in both quality and tone but generally speaking it adopts a very light-hearted spy spoof approach, and in fact at times  it degenerates into out-and-out farce.

The Birds of a Feather Affair is much closer in feel to the first season of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. which combined solid exciting spy thriller plots with a mildly tongue-in-cheek approach.

The novel does have its outlandish elements but it also has some surprisingly dark moments.

The story begins with U.N.C.L.E. agent April Dancer arriving at fellow-agent Mark Slate’s apartment to find that he’s disappeared. What she does find there is a glamorous redhead and a deadly snake. She suspects that Mark has been kidnapped by THRUSH. And then a multi-national delegation arrives and kidnaps her.

Mr Waverley has no doubts as to what is going on. U.N.C.L.E. has captured one of THRUSH’s most important agents, a man named Zorki, and THRUSH are obviously hoping to trade Mark and April for Zorki. Zorki however holds the key to a discovery so astounding and so dangerous that Mr Waverley is not willing to give him up under any circumstances. He does however have a plan to hoodwink THRUSH over the affair.

In this adventure April Dancer and Mark Slate are up against THRUSH agents who are outstanding not just for their cunning but for their deviousness and cruelty. There’s the sadistic Arnolda Van Atta and the creepy and mysterious Mr Riddle, not to mention Fried Rice and Pig Alley. Even worse, there may be treachery within U.N.C.L.E. headquarters.

The action is fairly relentless. Avallone’s style is not always polished but his pacing can’t be faulted. The action climax is effective enough.

Apart from being much darker in tone than the TV series the violence is also slightly more graphic and there are some faint hints of sexual perversity that you weren’t going to see on prime-time TV in 1966.

A successful TV tie-in novel has to get the characters right. They have to be recognisably the characters from the TV series. The difficulty with this book is that the darker tone means that some of the good-natured banter between the two lead characters is missing. April is reasonably convincing. Mark Slate perhaps does not quite have the boyish charm that he should have and he's just a tiny bit too overtly macho but overall the novel succeeds at least reasonably well on this level.

A successful TV tie-in novel normally needs to capture the tone of the TV series as well but in this case the author has obviously deliberately chosen to aim for a quite different feel. Given that the TV series suffers from taking the comic approach way too far I can’t say that I blame Avallone for his decision. He has tried to write a genuine spy thriller. It’s not that the book takes itself overly seriously, but it takes itself seriously enough to work as a piece of spy fiction. If only that more slightly more serious approach had been taken with the TV series it might have been far more successful.

The Birds of a Feather Affair isn’t great spy fiction but it’s fast-moving and exciting and it’s entertaining in a lightweight sort of way. You’re probably not going to read this novel unless you’re a fan of the TV show, but if you are a fan of the series I think it’s worth picking up. It's not quite as successful as the Man from U.N.C.L.E. novel The Dagger Affair but it can still be recommended.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. - The Dagger Affair (novel)

TV tie-in novels have been around for a very long time and while they have never been a consuming interest for me over the years I have read a number. I’ve never been very interested in the “novelisations” based directly on episodes of the TV series. To me that has always seemed to be a fairly pointless concept. Original novels based on TV series always seemed to be a more interesting idea.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. may well have been the first TV series to spawn a really spectacularly successful and prolific cycle of TV tie-in novels. Twenty-four original novels were published between 1965 and 1968 and they sold in enormous quantities.

The Dagger Affair was the fourth to appear, in 1965. The author, David McDaniel, went on to write half a dozen Man from U.N.C.L.E. novels including some of the biggest sellers in the series. He also wrote a tie-in novel based on The Prisoner. McDaniel’s literary career was cut short by his early death in 1977 at the age of 38.

The Dagger Affair opens with a break-in at Illya Kuryakin’s apartment and with Napoleon Solo having a chance encounter with a girl in a fast car. Whilst racing the girl his own car develops serious engine trouble which oddly enough seems to fix itself in a short time.  Trivial enough events but they occur at the exact moment that Mr Waverley is fretting about the fact that T.H.R.U.S.H. is not up to anything. That worries him because it isn’t natural. T.H.R.U.S.H. is always up to something. If they’re not then they must be planning something big.

Solo and Kuryakin are off to Los Angeles to follow up a very slender lead. They discover that T.H.R.U.S.H. is worried as well. They’re worried about D.A.G.G.E.R. and mostly they’re worried because they don’t know D.A.G.G.E.R. is but they’re sure it’s important.

Mr Solo’s engine trouble was in fact an important clue. A reclusive and eccentric young scientist has built a device called an Energy Damper that has strange and severe effects on electrical devices, and possibly on other things as well. Like people. Eccentric is perhaps the wrong word to describe this young man. Severely paranoid and totally insane might be more accurate.

The Energy Damper has the potential to destroy civilisation. Even T.H.R.U.S.H. are horrified. They’re so horrified they’re offering to work together with U.N.C.L.E. to save civilisation. Even this may not guarantee success - D.A.G.G.E.R. is an organisation run by full-blown fanatics with a super-weapon.

A successful TV tie-in novel needs to capture the flavour of the original TV series. If a Man from U.N.C.L.E. novel ends up being just a generic spy story with characters who happen to be named Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin then (in my view) it’s pretty pointless. The Dagger Affair does a reasonably good job of capturing the necessary flavour. It’s important to note that in this case it’s the flavour of the first season of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., when the tongue-in-cheek elements were definitely present but were kept under control and the plots were at least semi-serious spy stories. They could be somewhat far-fetched but the series had not yet descended into self-parody.

That’s the feel that McDaniel achieves. The central plot device, the Energy Damper, is fanciful but can at least be made to sound vaguely plausible with enough technobabble to back it up. There’s plenty of action and it’s treated more or less the way the action is treated in the TV series, with lots of gunplay but no graphic violence (although there is some gruesome threatened violence during an extended and rather baroque interrogation sequence). Mr Solo takes a keen interest in the female of the species but there’s no actual sex. The story is handled with a moderate attempt at realism but Solo and Kuryakin get to trade wise-cracks and their characterisations are pretty consistent with their TV counterparts.

While there are moments that are gently humorous McDaniel is definitely not aiming for comedy and his approach is fairly consistent with that of the first season of the TV show.

McDaniel takes the opportunity of giving us a fascinating glimpse into the history of T.H.R.U.S.H. going back to the 19th century. Of course the novels are presumably not regarded as canon but it’s still an amusing idea that one of the founding fathers of this infamous criminal organisation was none other than Professor Moriarty! It’s a weird but fun touch.

The whole point of a TV tie-in novel is that the target audience is fans who have watched every episode and still want more and The Dagger Affair seems just like the thing to satisfy that craving. It was a huge seller so obviously in this case the strategy worked. The Dagger Affair might not be absolutely top-flight spy fiction but it’s fast-moving and it’s enjoyable in a lightweight way and it does feel like a Man from U.N.C.L.E. adventure.

I was pleasantly surprised by The Dagger Affair, and I’m encouraged enough to be seriously considering sample a few more TV tie-in novels based on 60s and 60s cult TV series.